Recent Reading

      Having finished William Gibson's Agency yesterday, I turned to the next book on my pile, Joe Steele, by Harry Turtledove.

      In this alternative history, Stalin's parents emigrate to California before he is born.  The child grows up, becomes a labor agitator under a pseudonym and moves into politics, challenging FDR for the Democrat nomination in 1932.  It promises to be interesting, though the normally-meticulous Turtledove jarred me in the first chapter by having a reporter disliking his Remington portable typewriter for its weight and musing that it would make a hole in the sidewalk if he threw it out his seventh-floor window.   --Nope, sorry.  This would be the era of Remington's "crank-up" portable, low-profile four-row machines that weighed very little more than the competing three-row Corona and Underwood portables and were easier to type on.*  To minimize the bulk when stored, the striker arms laid flat and a quarter-turn crank on the side brought them up to the ready position for use when the cover was off.

      Right before rereading The Peripheral and Agency, I read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, another alternate history novel, this one set in a world where Charles Lindbergh runs against FDR in 1940 and wins.  (It was later made into an HBO series, which I haven't seen.)  The viewpoint character is an eight-year-old boy living in Newark, New Jersey and he is essentially autobiographical.  Events take a turn for the worse in the book's timeline, though it is not as heavy-handed as you might expect -- and all the more chilling for it.  I thought it was well worth reading.
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* In fairness, the contemporary and nominally portable Remington Noiseless is quite chunky, a result of the mechanism that makes it much quieter than most typewriters.